The invention is in the field of mobile computing applications, and more particularly in the field of mobile commerce applications enabling merchants to exchange valuable information with retail consumers.
Many retail stores maintain valuable online resources, where one can find descriptions and specifications of the merchandise, reviews, and ratings. To facilitate sales the stores are interested in providing such information to their visitors while they are in the store.
This goal can be achieved with web-enabled mobile devices, such as smart phones with embedded cameras. A merchant application provides software, which can read optical codes, 1-D or 2-D barcodes for example, associated with the merchandise by the merchant or manufacturer, and then convert the code into a URL or similar link to information on the merchant website, for example. Such optical code and information retrieval methodology would be a working solution for a single merchant. In reality, there are many merchants, each with different coding conventions, and a customer would need to download and manage multiple custom merchant applications, which is cumbersome and inconvenient.